Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, mobile phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment, as examples. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon. Dozens or hundreds of integrated circuits (ICs) are typically manufactured on a single semiconductor wafer, and individual dies on the wafer are singulated by sawing between the ICs along scribe lines. The individual dies are typically packaged separately, in multi-chip modules, or in other types of packaging, for example.
As demands for miniaturization, higher speed, greater bandwidth, lower power consumption, and reduced latency have grown, a need has developed for improving semiconductor device component density. Stacked semiconductor devices, e.g., three-dimensional integrated circuits (3DICs), have been developed to reduce the physical size and two-dimensional footprint of semiconductor devices. In a stacked semiconductor device, active circuits (e.g., logic, memory, processor circuits, etc.) are fabricated on different semiconductor wafers. Two or more semiconductor wafers or dies may be mounted together through conventional techniques to increase device component density. Resulting stacked semiconductor devices generally provide smaller form factors with improved performance and lower power consumption.
The drawings accompanying and forming part of this specification are included to representatively illustrate certain aspects of the disclosure. It should be noted that the features illustrated in the drawings are not necessarily drawn to scale.